Interview with Tabish Khair, Author of "The Body by The Shore"

on Oct 28, 2022

Tabish Khair was born in1966 and educated in Gaya, a small town in Bihar, India. He is the acclaimed author of 6 novels--of which Interlink published two: Just Another Jihadi Jane and How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position--and 2 poetry collections. Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, his novels have been shortlisted for more than a dozen major prizes, including the Man Asian, the DSC Prize, and the Encore Prize. An Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, he has been a Leverhulme Guest Professor at Leeds University, UK, and has also been awarded guest professorships or honorary fellowships at Delhi University (India), York University (UK), Cambridge University (UK), and others.

Frontlist: Your book ranges over different timelines, deals with various issues, and addresses social conventions. How did you decide on the theme of this book?

Tabish: There is always a central germ and then there are so many other influences, which grow and wither in the writing process. The germ in this case was the idea that the mitochondria, which is essential to all multi-cellular life on earth, was a once-in-evolution event. This happened when a single-celled organism (a microbe) swallowed another single-celled organism but did not fully digest it – leading to a wonderful symbiosis. From there, I moved on to the essential fiction undergirding my novel: What if ‘abstract reason,’ supposed to be distinctive about the Homo sapiens, is itself a similar event? What if abstract reason itself is the result of symbiosis, of the effect of a microbe (or something similar, perhaps from outer space) on the human brain? This was fun to develop, given the contentious discourses around reason, and its supposed opposition to emotion, etc. The rest grew out of it. But of course, The Body By the Shore is, looking back, also very much a pandemic novel. Not just because it features microbes and viruses as actual agents of change and is narrated from the perspective of the year 2030-31. More interestingly, I was confined to my house, and inevitably the novel ranges far more widely across the world than any of my previous works! I suppose that is also one of the ways in which the human mind and literature work.

Frontlist: In addition to social prejudices, your book has touched upon the subject of ‘Climate Change.’ Do you think it ultimately boils down to the political will to take necessary action to combat climate change, or is there an individual part we can all play?

Tabish: I think it boils down to the deep and essentially criminal imbrication of politics with capital in every country of the world. Until and unless this changes, nothing significant will happen. You cannot really engage with climate change if your first priority is to increase capital – which has a deathly numerical logic that, left unquestioned and unchecked, can and does destroy lives. But yes, no change can happen without individuals: it is finally dependent on individual actions too. The problem is that many of our received categories of change – development, progress, affluence, happiness, etc. – are themselves structured by the logic of capital, and hence are essentially destructive of the environment, life, plants, animals, and individuals. We need to think of such categories in other terms, but there is a lot of pressure on us – cultural, political, legal, and educational – not to do so.

Frontlist: Racism is a prevalent problem even in the modern era of the twenty-first century. What part do you believe education can play in this to improve the situation?

Tabish: Racism is an easier matter to resolve than climate change. It might never disappear, but you can see that its forms are less virulent today than they were during the slavery years of the nineteenth century. The reason why it may never disappear is that racism, as we came to know it by the end of the nineteenth century, was essentially a warped logic to enable deep and permanent economic exploitation. That logic has not disappeared.

Frontlist: What do you think are the main reasons for the popularity of science fiction? To what extent has the film industry helped popularize the genre? Will sci-fi movies substitute science fiction novels one day?

Tabish: I play with different genres. That is why my novels tend to be different, something critics and prize committees have failed to notice. In my case, SciFi offers some options to think and make others think. But so does gothic fiction, detective fiction, or any other genre. As I keep saying, for me literature is primarily a thinking device: entertainment can be part of it, for you need to grab someone’s attention before you can make him or she engages. But finally, literature qua literature is a complex and distinctive thinking device.

Frontlist: How do you see the future of science fiction literature? Will science fiction maintain its independence or intertwine with other literary genres?

Tabish: I cannot answer for others, and I do not claim to foresee the future. But a genre that gets straight-jacketed ends up being sheer entertainment; it loses its capacity to be a thinking device. So I think the best works of SciFi – like the best works in other areas, including so-called ‘literary novels’ – will draw upon and play with other genres too in the future.

Frontlist: What part of the book did you struggle writing?

Tabish: The oil rig. I have never been on one. But it was fun to struggle to enter a totally unknown space. After all, that is also what fiction can do.